The Composition of Martin Eden

lfAARTIN EDEN (I909), one of Jack London's most highly regarded IVIL novels, has been surrounded for years by controversy. Although some of the disagreements about its meaning and artistic merits will undoubtedly continue indefinitely and may even be a measure of its vitality, others stem from erroneous information about the process of composition. One can find in print, for example, conflicting accounts of when London began the novel and when he finished it. The terminal date is especially important, because it bears on the central issue of London's decision to close the novel with the protagonist's suicide. Franklin Walker put the negative view of the ending succinctly when he wrote that many readers of Martin Eden have felt that suicide was not by any means the logical conclusion of a story dealing with the hero's success against odds.1 Walker went on to defend this position by arguing that London abandoned a plan to extend Martin's adventures to the South Seas and belatedly chose the suicide as a way of bringing the story quickly to an end. But there exists a considerable body of evidence, much of it among unpublished papers, that calls Walker's theory into serious question. Such evidence can place the whole controversy on firmer ground by providing an accurate account of the novel's development, from the initial conception to the completion of the manuscript. London wrote Martin Eden during his voyage to the South Seas in his ketch, the Snark. As his wife, Charmian, accurately stated in her 192I biography, he began it in the summer of 1907 in Honolulu and finshed it at Tahiti in February of ig08.2 She referred to it in her diary for the first time on 8 August I907, noting that she was

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